CHAPTER 2 · PROBATIONER

Please give our very best wishes and greetings to the Old Man. I hope that in case of need you won’t forget me here. I’m particularly asking you this because, regretfully, the relations that have developed between the new ‘court’ and myself might cause some people over there to forget me.” Sharon’s letter from London, dated July 28, 1958, was addressed to “Dear Yitzhak”—Ben-Gurion’s secretary, Yitzhak Navon. “Of course you’re too busy with much bigger and more important matters,” the plaintive cri de coeur continued, “for me to trouble you with these little things … But please—don’t forget I’m here, waiting for a summons in case of need. Warm wishes from Margalit, Arik.”¹

He was at the Royal Military Academy in Camberley, Surrey, for a yearlong course for middle-ranking officers from Britain itself and from around the world. Gali lived in a rented flat in London with their newborn son, Gur, and Arik would come home for “weekends of music and theater in London … On the whole, I was happy about it, but I was concerned too. I had left my command, the source of my strength.”²

Sharon’s sojourn in the U.K. was an elegant form of exile, contrived by Chief of Staff Dayan. Sharon had not exactly left his command, but in effect had been fired, at the insistence of the CO of Central Command, Zvi Tzur. The disaffection among the paratroop brigade officers, which reached a crescendo at that day of open recriminations in March 1957, never really let up. Ben-Gurion was aware of it. He wrote to Dayan urging him to “try to overcome these manifestations of small-mindedness that plague our little country.”

Dayan’s evident failure to overcome the small-mindedness that Ben-Gurion discerned around Sharon, and his recommendation that Sharon spend a year in the U.K. rather than defending the borders, signaled two uncomfortable truths for the acerbic, arrogant, but gifted twenty-nine-year-old who had known nothing but combat since his teens. The first was that Israel’s policy makers looked forward now to a period of peace after the IDF’s success in the Sinai War. The second, even more difficult for Sharon to appreciate, was that life in a peacetime army is not nearly so fast moving and studded with opportunity as it is in an army engaged in constant conflict. Different qualities are required of peacetime officers: less panache and improvisation; more diligence and patient application to training and discipline.

Camberley drove home the same disquieting lesson. The military life, he discovered from his British comrades, is a long and dogged haul, punctuated by the surges of action and rapid promotions that wars provide. Looking around him, Sharon saw “people who years ago had been brigadier generals in France or Italy or the Western Desert [and] were now climbing slowly up the peacetime ladder. And by and large they accepted it with a casual nonchalance.”³ Casual nonchalance was not his strong suit.

“Dear Shimon,” he wrote in September 1958 to the director general of the Defense Ministry, Shimon Peres. “Following our conversation several weeks ago about the structure of the IDF, I am sending you my thoughts on the subject.” He believed that Ben-Gurion was grooming him as a future chief of staff, and he seems to have presumed that Peres, the Old Man’s close aide, was privy to this intent. In fact, though, Peres insisted half a century later, “Ben-Gurion would never have appointed Arik. There is no question at all in my mind. Despite his abiding love and admiration for him. No question at all.”⁴

Sharon wrote that he and Gali were taking back with them a little car that his uncle had bought them as a gift. “We’re doing this so that Gali can work at the hospital [in Jerusalem] without wasting hours each day traveling up and down [by public transport],” he explained to Peres, apparently feeling the need to justify this conspicuous consumption in the still-austere Israeli environment.

His anticipated frustration on his return home proved well-founded. There was no field command for Sharon. The best the army could come up with was a desk job in Tel Aviv, in the training branch, as head of infantry training. If he took it, he was told, he would get full colonel, the rank he ought to have got, by his own reckoning, years earlier when the paratroopers became a brigade. In November, Ben-Gurion called him in. “Have you weaned yourself of your off-putting proclivity for not telling the truth?” Sharon meekly assured the Old Man that he had. “He admitted that he had not told the truth on occasion in the past,” Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary, “but he said he doesn’t anymore.”

Sharon, at any rate, came away from the meeting with the sense that the Old Man was watching over him and would not let his detractors crush his career.⁵ But for the present he must keep his head down. He agreed to take the proffered staff posting.

A few months later, he lost it. The head of training, General Yosef Geva, fired him for failing to turn up at a meeting and then lying about why he hadn’t come. Ben-Gurion stepped in to make sure he wasn’t ousted from the army altogether. “He is brave, original, and resourceful,” Ben-Gurion remonstrated with Geva. “Yes, but he’s not disciplined, and he doesn’t tell the truth,” was Geva’s reply.⁶ The general agreed to give him another chance, as commander of the army’s infantry school. Here Sharon was to spend the next three years in what he himself called “exile in the wilderness.”

He took the job seriously, at least at first, planning and implementing strenuous but imaginative training programs for the young officers and NCOs undergoing courses at the school. They all knew his history and regarded him with distant awe. His colleagues in the training department of the General Staff found him creative and stimulating in their discussions on military theory and in their work on training manuals. The staff of the infantry school, on the other hand, suffered from Sharon’s moodiness and short temper. He seemed to take out all his frustration on them. Meetings too often ended with him bawling someone out for no reasonable cause. Time after time, an instructor or administrator would be seen hauling his kit bag to the camp gate, fired by Sharon for a trivial infringement or for nothing at all save getting on the commander’s nerves.

After a time, he began getting on his own nerves. He registered at the Tel Aviv branch of the Hebrew University Law School. He would have preferred to study agriculture, he wrote later, as his father had wanted. But that would have required full-time attendance.^a

The end of the dour Haim Laskov’s term as chief of staff brought no relief: the new chief was Zvi Tzur, and he stolidly withstood all of Ben-Gurion’s urgings to bring Sharon back in from the cold. “I even went to see Dayan,” Sharon writes. “[He]…was serving as minister of agriculture…‘Arik,’ he said, ‘there is no way for you to get out of it. You will have to wait for a crisis to come along. It’s only then that they will let you out.’ ”

Sharon enrolled in the army’s tank school, diligently learning his way through all the courses: driver, gunner, loader, radioman, and tank commander. He studied the mechanics of the tank and the tactics for deploying platoons, then battalions, and finally whole brigades of tanks. As a rookie tank officer, Sharon displayed tactical boldness and originality that impressed the top instructor at the school, Yitzhak Ben-Ari. In every war game, Ben-Ari reported, Sharon would come up with novel suggestions that defied traditional armored corps theory. His schemes involved deep thrusts through the enemy defenses in order to precipitate a collapse. But other officers faulted Sharon’s ideas as too risky and too costly in lives.

In early 1962, he was thrown a crumb of comfort: Chief of Staff Tzur grudgingly assigned a reserve mechanized brigade to Sharon’s command. At least if there was a war he would have a substantial role in the fighting. He declined. “I was holding out for an armored brigade. Tanks were emerging as a crucial element in [Israel’s] strategic thinking.” Eventually, he got one. But his ambitions still soared much higher than that. He asked for the job of IDF chief of operations. This drew from Tzur another predictable refusal.

“On May 2 all these problems turned suddenly meaningless,” Sharon writes in Warrior.⁷ Gali was killed in her little Austin car on the winding road to Jerusalem, near the village of Abu Ghosh. She swerved out of her lane and was hit by an oncoming truck. Arik was brought the news by his next-door neighbor, Motti Hod, a senior air force officer. He wept inconsolably, Hod recalled. At the funeral the next day, though, he kept a stiff military bearing. In a deadpan voice, he read out the eulogy he had written, recalling their teenage love and their years together.

The British car was a right-hand drive, and there was speculation that perhaps that was a factor in the accident. But among Gali’s colleagues and friends there was an acrid undercurrent of suspicion that the cause of her death was to be sought in her growing anguish over Arik’s relationship with her younger sister, Lily. There had been rumors of a romance between them.

Lily, four years younger than Gali, was strikingly good-looking with long black hair. When she enlisted, Arik pulled strings for her to serve in the paratroop brigade. She was around the Sharon home a good deal, often looking after Gur when Gali was out working. Now she moved in full-time to take care of the orphaned child, who was deeply attached to her. Arik, too, made a point of spending time with his son and came home from his base almost every night. A year after Gali’s death, Arik and Lily were married.

“I didn’t go to the wedding,” a close family friend recalled.

There was a sort of dark cloud hanging over it. I liked Margalit a lot. She was a very serious person. Very professional and accomplished in her work. An impressive young woman. But there was always something sad about her…[My husband] went. He said he didn’t want to judge anyone, especially not a good friend. Many in our group of friends stayed away. But as I came to know Lily better, I changed my attitude toward her, especially when I saw how she brought up Gur … Over the years we grew close. She never mentioned Margalit, though. Not to me at any rate. I never heard her talk about her.⁸

In a newspaper interview years later, Lily said she had married Arik “because it was good for Gur. Today, looking back, I can say that in fact I loved him very much then already. But it wasn’t love that decided it. The situation was that we were two people with a shared, sacred goal—to look after a little boy who had lost his mother.”⁹ The police examiners who investigated the accident, meanwhile, found significant contributory negligence in Margalit’s driving. A suit filed by Arik and Gur against the truck driver’s insurance company was settled out of court. The driver did not admit to any guilt on his part.¹⁰

In August 1964, Gur, now eight, welcomed a little brother into his life. Arik and Lily’s firstborn, Omri, joined the family, living now in a rented home in the northern village of Nahalal. Gur also got a pony of his own, a gift from his father to help him take to life in the country. They often rode out together through the flat expanses of the Valley of Jezreel and the hills of lower Galilee. It was a happy time all around. Arik was back on the fast track. He was deputy commanding officer at Northern Command, serving on the front line directly under a man he respected and liked, General Avraham Yoffe.

Ben-Gurion handed over both the prime ministership and the Ministry of Defense to Levi Eshkol, and with them a strong recommendation to name Yitzhak Rabin chief of staff after Tzur. Eshkol seemed willing to comply, and Ben-Gurion called in Rabin to tell him. In that same conversation, Rabin wrote later, “he opened his heart to me and said, ‘You know I have a special regard for Arik Sharon. I see him as one of our best military men and one of the finest fighters the State of Israel has had. If he would only tell the truth, that would help him get ahead. I’m asking you, please don’t treat him the way he’s been treated until now.’ ”

Rabin writes of his “personal commitment to Ben-Gurion…[But] I decided to advance Arik not just to fulfill Ben-Gurion’s wish. In my own previous position on the General Staff, I had been extraordinarily impressed by Arik’s work as a reserves brigade commander: his organization of the brigade, his training schedule, his guidance and leadership of the officers. He created a formidable fighting force. This showed me what he was capable of.”

Rabin took over on January 1, 1964.

In my first week as chief of staff, I called him in and said, “Everyone knows you’re a superb military man. Your trouble is, though, that people tend to believe you’re not a decent human being. I don’t know you well enough to say. I want to promote you, but I’ve got to be sure that your accusers aren’t right. I am going to appoint you for one year as deputy commanding officer at Northern Command. If at the end of the year your direct superior, the CO of Northern Command, says that you behaved like a decent human being, then I’ll promote you to general.”¹¹

Sharon’s seven lean years were over.

Yoffe was one general who didn’t want to oust Sharon or block his advancement. He accepted the new chief of staff’s challenge, welcoming Sharon to the north but cautioning him—and reassuring his apprehensive staff—that his advent must not entail a purge. He must prove himself by proving he could run Northern Command, and run it well, with the help of all the officers currently serving there.

No sooner had Rabin (and Sharon) assumed their new roles than a sharp downturn occurred in relations between Israel and the Arab world, and most especially between Israel and Syria. An Arab League summit convened in Cairo in January 1964 and resolved to thwart Israel’s National Water Carrier, a major new project that had been under construction for several years and was now nearing completion. The carrier was designed to siphon off Jordan River waters entering the Sea of Galilee from the north and transport them, by canal and by underground pipe, to the center and arid south of the country, where annual rainfall was much sparser.

The Zionist dream of “making the desert bloom”—meaning particularly the parched Negev desert, which constituted the bulk of Israel’s territory—depended in large part on the success of this enterprise. The Arab states adopted a “headwater diversion plan” designed to divert much of the Jordan waters before they reached the Sea of Galilee. For Israel this was unacceptable. Eshkol, the new prime minister and minister of defense, made it clear that Israel would act to thwart the Arab plan.

The same Arab summit of 1964 also saluted the birth of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), injecting new vigor into the Palestinian cause. The summit created the PLA, or Palestine Liberation Army, and resolved that all the armies of all the frontline states would operate under a single unified command. Palestinian guerrilla groups, among them Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat, began mounting attacks on civilian targets inside Israel. Syria gave active encouragement to such attacks. Jordan and Lebanon provided passive support.¹²

In November, Syrian tractors and bulldozers went to work on their planned canal. The IDF responded with artillery fire directed at the earthworks. Syrian artillery, high on the Golan escarpment, retaliated by firing down onto the Israeli settlements below. The escalation continued with Syrian attacks on Israeli fishermen out in the Sea of Galilee and Israeli reprisals along the border. Israeli tanks were frequently in action, too, and on several occasions the air force took part, providing firepower that countered Syria’s topographical advantage.

Compounding the overall tension was incessant skirmishing over three “demilitarized zones” along the Israel-Syria border. Israel insisted on its right under the 1949 Armistice Agreement to cultivate these areas and retaliated forcefully against Syrian firing on the Israeli farmers.

Rabin writes that many, including Dayan, believed there was no way to stop the Syrian diversion work short of all-out war. He himself, however, believed with Eshkol that a firm but restrained strategy could be effective, both in stopping the Syrian project and in containing the Palestinian incursions. In the event, the Syrians halted their project in the summer of 1965. The sporadic clashes continued, however. They climaxed in April 1967 when Israeli pilots shot down six Syrian MiGs in a dogfight over the Golan Heights.

Sharon reveled in being back in the thick of things. He seemed to be present at every border skirmish and often took part in the shooting himself. When there was no skirmishing, he would tour the front incessantly and kept the units busy with training and snap inspections. Ehud Barak, a future prime minister and political rival, at the time an officer in the supersecret Sayeret Matkal commando unit, remembered years later “what a pleasure it was to be debriefed by Sharon after a mission across the border, or to be inspected by him before a mission. It was all at his fingertips: how to learn a route, how to prepare weapons and equipment, what would really be needed over there. He knew it all.”¹³

Once again, as with the reprisal operations in the 1950s, Sharon was an instrument of the policy, which was determined not by him but by others much his senior in rank and authority. Once again, he was a convenient, prominent, self-aggrandizing target for critics who opposed the policy as excessively aggressive.

Sharon completed his year’s probation and received a favorable report from Yoffe. “He passed the test without a shadow of a doubt,” Rabin wrote in his memoirs.¹⁴ But Yoffe retired at the end of 1964, and when David Elazar took over at Northern Command, Sharon found himself embroiled again in internal rivalries and backstabbing. He asked for time off and flew to East Africa with Yoffe for a long trekking and safari holiday. When he returned, another deputy had been appointed alongside him. “From then until the fall of 1965 I stepped as lightly as I could through a minefield of bickering and intrigue.”¹⁵

Not lightly enough, though. When he finally left Northern Command in October, he was kept cooling his heels at home for three months between jobs.

At last Rabin invited me in for a talk—a very blunt talk, as it turned out, with no pulled punches. He let me know precisely how he felt about my performance—the things I had done wrong, my relationship with … Elazar, everything…

So it was something of a surprise to hear him finish up the litany of my failings by saying that despite the criticisms I was now promoted to major general^b and appointed as director of military training [and] commander of a reserve division.

I was as happy as I was surprised. Lily prepared a small party … Not too long afterward we moved back to the house in Zahala so that I could be closer to my new headquarters. There, six months later, our third son, Gilad Yehuda, was born. Our dream of having a large family seemed on its way to being fulfilled.

“Never, in all its wars,” writes Yitzhak Rabin, asking his readers’ indulgence for this rare immodesty, “was the IDF readied for war more perfectly than it was before the Six-Day War.” As head of training from early 1966, Sharon was certainly entitled to take a share in the credit for that amazing military victory, over and above his direct role in it as the commander of an armored division in Sinai. His basic training manual was the “spirit of the paratroopers.” He instituted a commando course for all officers in field units as a way of inculcating the paratroop techniques and traditions throughout the fighting army.

He also worked diligently to keep abreast of everything that was known in Western armies of Russian weaponry and battlefield tactics. The Russians were steadily deepening their involvement in the equipping and training of the Egyptian and Syrian armies. Israel for its part was beginning to see some initial, limited success from its own persistent efforts to break down the arms embargo that America had imposed on the Jewish state since its inception. The first U.S. tanks—not, yet, the latest models—began to arrive, bolstering the IDF’s British (also not the top of the line) and French armory.

Sharon’s ability as a military commander and a leader of men came into its own during the critical period from the middle of May until June 5, 1967, when the army found itself suddenly plunged into an eve-of-war deployment, as the politicians scrambled desperately to avoid war. “Arik issued new instructions,” a military correspondent wrote, describing life in Sharon’s division, dug in on the Negev-Sinai border. “The spontaneous, rather casual appearance of the troops was to disappear, to be replaced by established military routine…[S]mall tents were erected in which barbers cut soldiers’ hair. Shaving was compulsory and walking around without weapon or helmet resulted in punishment. Prisons were built and MP platoons arrived from Beersheba. Training was to resume in all units … An army of reservists was to be transformed into a body of regulars, united, trained, patient.”

The correspondent was Lieutenant (res.) Yael Dayan, daughter of the former chief of staff. Moshe was now, since Ben-Gurion’s break with his own Mapai Party, an opposition backbench member of the Knesset in the Old Man’s new, disappointingly small Rafi Party. Yael, a successful author, was mobilized as one of the army spokesman’s pool of correspondents whose dispatches were distributed to local and foreign media. “I had suggested I join Arik’s headquarters … I am suspicious of all men who have become legends in their own lives, including my father. I [wanted] to verify or disprove the qualities attributed to him.”¹⁶

Those qualities were all on show in abundance—both the legendary ones and Sharon’s subversive proclivity for running down his superiors, military and civilian, in the hearing of his subordinates. This incessant, deliberate display of behind-the-back insubordination, a carryover from the wild days of Unit 101, was intended apparently to bond his officers together and to enhance his prestige in their eyes. Now, however, Sharon’s raucous whining was in tune with the general mood, both in the army and in the eerily quiet city streets. There was a mounting impatience, and beneath it a serious ebbing of confidence that threatened to weaken the nation under arms. “Guys, there’s just no one up there to rely on,” Sharon harangued his staff officers each time he returned from meetings in Tel Aviv. “This government is just no government at all.”¹⁷

The crisis with Egypt was instigated by the Kremlin. On May 13, the Speaker of the Egyptian parliament, Anwar Sadat, visiting Moscow, was informed by his Soviet hosts—falsely—that Israel was massing troops in the north for an attack on Syria. The same message was delivered to President Nasser by the Soviet ambassador in Cairo. Nasser ordered two divisions into Sinai. The troops marched through Cairo shouting, “We’re off to Tel-Aviv.”¹⁸

Israel strenuously denied any buildup in the north. Eshkol invited the Soviet ambassador to go up there and look for himself. Neither Syria nor Egypt had any evidence of it. Nevertheless, Nasser’s initial move engendered a momentum of its own. On May 16 he ordered more troops into Sinai and demanded that the UN Emergency Force (UNEF), deployed in the peninsula since the 1956 Sinai War, now withdraw from the border with Israel.

On May 23, Nasser announced the closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. This had been the casus belli for Israel in 1956, as he well knew. The Egyptian buildup was now approaching 100,000 men—seven full divisions and additional units. Egypt’s army fielded nearly 1,000 tanks and 900 artillery pieces. Its air force numbered more than 400 warplanes. Syria had some 60,000 men in its armed forces with 200 tanks and more than 100 planes, including dozens of ultramodern MiG-21s. Jordan, too, could deploy close to 60,000 men, 200 tanks, and 24 British-made planes. On May 30, President Nasser and King Hussein signed a joint defense pact putting Jordan’s Arab Legion under Egyptian command in case of war with Israel. Iraq sent a division into Jordan to join the Arab effort, and several other states sent smaller forces.

The IDF mustered some 1,300 tanks, 750 guns, and 250 warplanes, the best of them French-supplied Mirage fighters. Most of the land army was concentrated on the Sinai border, deployed in three beefed‑up divisions commanded respectively by Yisrael Tal, by Sharon’s friend and former commander Avraham Yoffe, and by Sharon himself. The basic strategy they hoped to apply called for attack, for taking the war to the enemy on his territory rather than within Israel’s slender confines. The Egyptians, they assumed, were poised to slice into the southern Negev, cutting through to Jordan and severing Eilat from the rest of the country.

On May 24, Rabin took sick, purportedly from nicotine poisoning brought on by too much smoking but more likely from frayed nerves in the face of the unremitting tension. His collapse was kept from the public, and in forty-eight hours he recovered. But a halting and hesitant radio broadcast from Eshkol on May 28 heightened public apprehension instead of dispelling it. This was unfortunate and unnecessary, the product of sloppy staff work—the prime minister’s typed text was full of semi-legible handwritten corrections—rather than reflecting any weakness on Eshkol’s part. Indeed, as the industrious and serious-minded minister of defense during the past four years, he, no less than Rabin, deserved a major share of the credit for preparing the army to fight. But Eshkol was determined to exhaust every diplomatic option before giving the army the green light for war.

With each passing day the nation’s fighting spirit seemed to sag. Among the generals of the High Command there was much grumbling, muted for the most part by the proper constitutional constraints and kept firmly out of the press. On May 28, though, after a particularly caustic meeting between senior ministers and the General Staff, Sharon said something to Rabin about the hypothetical possibility of a military coup in Israel. “Not in the sense of seizing power out of a desire to rule,” Sharon himself explained years later to a high-ranking ex-military researcher. “But in the sense of taking a decision, a fundamental decision. The army could take such a decision, I suggested, without the cabinet. And it would be well received [by the public].”¹⁹

On the streets of Tel Aviv, meanwhile, a clamor arose to bring back Ben-Gurion. But to no avail. The venom that had poisoned relations in recent years between Eshkol and his erstwhile comrade and mentor made that impossible.²⁰

The public pressure now shifted to appointing Dayan defense minister. To this, Eshkol reluctantly agreed. On June 2, the morning Dayan’s appointment was announced, the ministers and the generals met again. Rabin warned of “a serious threat to Israel’s very existence … The longer we wait passively, the stronger the Arabs’ confidence grows that Israel is not capable of confronting this challenge.” He urged “a decisive aerial strike” that would destroy the Egyptian air force “in a single day.”

Sharon, the most junior of the generals, was the most outspoken. “Our goal is no less than to destroy the Egyptian forces … But because of hesitation and foot-dragging we have lost the key element of surprise.” He praised the morale of the people, appearing to contrast it with the faintheartedness of the government. General Matti Peled, head of the logistics branch, also spoke sharply, warning of the effects on the national economy of the prolonged mobilization. “Why do you let this disgrace go on?” he hurled at the ministers.

Dayan broadly agreed. He said the IDF could achieve its war aims in six days. In the discussion that followed, Eshkol upbraided Sharon and Peled. He accused them of “rearing up against the government.” He explained once again why it was important to give international diplomacy every opportunity to play out. The meeting broke up, still without a decision.

Once again, Sharon—as he himself testified—stayed behind chatting furtively with Rabin. “I said that if we had got up at a certain point and said, ‘Listen, you lot, your decisions are endangering the State of Israel. And since the situation is extremely serious, you are hereby requested to go into the adjoining room and stay there while the chief of staff goes to the national radio station and broadcasts an announcement. In my judgment, if we did that they would have accepted it with a sense of relief and liberation.”

Sharon first recounted these dramatic moments to the Haaretz military commentator Ze’ev Schiff, soon after the war. Sharon shared with the reporter his hypothetical fantasy of locking the ministers in a room while the chief of staff went on the air. But he did not mention that he had shared the idea with Rabin, as he claimed in his testimony to the military historian more than thirty years later. Schiff suggested that the later embellishment may well have been apocryphal.²¹

A decision to go to war on June 5, barring unforeseen developments, was made secretly by Eshkol and a small group of top ministers soon after the larger meeting with the generals on June 2. It was approved by the full cabinet on June 4.

Sharon admits that “with Dayan present, it was like a fresh wind.” He had been railing for days against the High Command’s original plan for a phased attack in Sinai, “one division first, then the other two twelve hours later. I argued vehemently against that … It would be a waste not to attack simultaneously everywhere, to devastate the entire Egyptian army at once.”²² This was Dayan’s thinking, too. Sharon, moreover, had shared with Dayan, then still a backbencher, his complex scheme for a divisional assault on the formidable Egyptian defenses at Abu Agheila—Umm Katef, the “gateway to Sinai.” This was his own division’s main assignment in the war. In 1956, it had taken the IDF, commanded by Dayan, three full days of stubborn fighting before Abu Agheila fell. This time, Sharon proposed to overrun it in one night.

With great prescience—but without, as it turned out, the determination to impose his orders—Dayan ordered the army not to occupy the Gaza Strip and not to advance right up to the Suez Canal.²³ In the event, both of these Pyrrhic successes occurred in the hectic, historic week ahead.

MODEL MAJOR GENERAL

Even Sharon’s more consistent and implacable critics make an exception for his performance in the Six-Day War.²⁴ It was classic: a battlefield commander in his métier, unsullied by outbursts of argument or disobedience. The conquest of Abu Agheila was accomplished in near perfection on the night of June 5–6, 1967. Once Sharon’s division had taken this strategic junction, Yoffe’s troops poured through it to the west, while Sharon’s own armor continued south to overrun another key Egyptian fortified complex at Nakhl.

At dawn on the fifth, Sharon drove in his staff car for a final meeting with his three armored brigade commanders. They talked through the next day’s plans one last time, shook hands, and embraced. Sharon took a small rucksack and blankets from the Studebaker sedan and stowed them in his jeep, amid the communication sets already hissing and chattering. Each of the brigades, and the headquarters team of jeeps and half-tracks, now trundled toward its assigned jumping-off point on the border.

Soon, the signal came through. Sharon took his microphone and, listing each of his brigades in a steady voice, he gave the order: “Nua, nua [move].” He watched through his binoculars as the columns of tanks lurched forward, churning the dust. Very soon they were shooting, engaging small Egyptian units deployed in forward defensive outposts close to the border.

By midday, when Sharon drove through the first Egyptian outposts overrun by his tanks, he knew that the war was essentially won. The air force had delivered what Rabin and the air force commander Motti Hod had promised the anxious ministers: the near-total destruction of the Egyptian air force. The first wave of Israeli jets came in from the sea and attacked Egyptian planes on the ground at 7:45. Many of the Egyptian pilots had been out on early morning patrols and were back at base, having breakfast. Israel hurled virtually its entire complement of frontline jets^c into this operation, and it proved decisive. Time after time throughout the morning, the Israeli planes returned to hit planes, hangars, radar installations, and runways all over Sinai and Lower Egypt. By 11:00, Hod was able to report that at least 180 Egyptian planes had been destroyed and that all the air bases had been rendered inoperative at least for the next few hours. The air force next turned its attention to Syria and to Jordan, too, after King Hussein rejected Eshkol’s appeals through the UN and the United States to hold his fire and stay out of the war. “Within two hours,” Rabin records, “the Jordanian and Syrian air forces had been destroyed, as had the Iraqi air base, H3, near the Iraq-Jordan border. Four hundred planes of various types were destroyed by the IAF [Israeli Air Force] on the first day of the war. These incredible results of the air force operation determined to a large extent the fate of the whole war.”²⁵

As Sharon and his headquarters team advanced toward Abu Agheila in the afternoon, they saw IAF French-made Fouga Magister training jets swooping down on Egyptian forces giving battle to one of Sharon’s brigades farther to the north. The Fougas had been fitted with machine guns and underwing rocket pods. They were the best the air force could spare for ground support on that first day of the war. Later, with the Sinai skies almost totally clear of enemy planes, the full power of the IAF’s Mirages and Mystères would be brought to bear on the Egyptian divisions.

The northern brigade, equipped with British-made Centurion tanks, had run into trouble earlier in the morning from Egyptian artillery and antitank fire. A battalion commander and two other officers were killed and several tanks disabled. The brigadier, Natke Nir, pulled back, regrouped, and attacked again in the afternoon, this time succeeding in overrunning the defensive position north of Abu Agheila itself. Still, the firefight showed how strongly dug in the Egyptians were around and inside the Abu Agheila–Umm Katef complex. Their artillery in particular, some eighty 130- and 122-millimeter Russian guns, would take a heavy toll on the Israeli attackers unless they could be silenced.

This task was assigned to a brigade of paratroopers under Danny Matt, ferried into position by relays of helicopters after nightfall. Their job was to storm the Egyptian guns from the rear, where they were least expected. The Centurions were to attack from the north, engaging the hundred-odd tanks deployed within the complex. Nir’s brigade was also to cut off the desert road from the northwest and the southwest, thus blocking reinforcements that might be sent in from deeper in Sinai.

At the same time—timing was the critical factor in Sharon’s intricate planning—an infantry brigade under Kuti Adam would storm the three rows of Egyptian trenches and concrete bunkers facing east, which were the main bulwark of the fortified position. The triple trenches were a textbook Soviet-style defensive deployment with the added advantage of difficult terrain at both ends: “high soft dunes in the north,” Sharon writes, “and in the south jagged ridges and broken foothills.” The infantry would go in from the north. Sharon knew the terrain from surveys he himself conducted after the Sinai War. He knew they could get through. Next, another brigade of tanks under Mordechai Zippori would charge forward parallel with the road, clearing a path through the minefields to confront the trenches in a narrow frontal assault.

As evening fell, the infantry arrived, carried to battle aboard a motley fleet of civilian buses that had been mobilized for war along with the reservists. They drove as far as they could on the old, rutted road, then let off their passengers. “Bus after bus was lined up as far back as I could see,” Sharon writes. “I went down to the road to watch the procession up close. Zippori’s Super Shermans moved up to take positions for their frontal assault. Then Kuti’s infantry, two endless lines along the side of the road, marching into the gritty wind from the dunes. Soon they would leave the road in a wide hook from the north … They saw me in the middle of the road, and it was impossible to miss their expressions of confidence and determination.”

The division’s third tank brigade, equipped with light French-made AMXs, was deployed farther to the south, blocking the road from the Egyptian divisional headquarters at Kseima, twenty miles to the southeast. There were also units engaged in an elaborate feint that Sharon mounted during the day in the direction of Kseima, in the hope of confusing the enemy as to his intentions. “Abu Agheila was the more formidable position,” he explains in Warrior. “The Ismailia road led right through the Abu Agheila defenses. Were I to take Kseima first, I would still have to deal with Abu Agheila. But if Abu Agheila fell, we would be in control of the roads behind Kseima, and the Egyptians would find the position untenable.”

Before his infantry and armor moved on their target with almost choreographed precision, Sharon unleashed a massive softening‑up bombardment from the six artillery battalions attached to his division. “Let everything tremble,” Sharon ordered the chief artillery officer, Yaacov Vaknin, just after 10:30 p.m. “Tremble it shall,” came the reply, shouted from the artillery command half-track standing alongside Sharon’s own half-track. For the next twenty minutes, shells and mortar bombs rained down on the Egyptian complex until Kuti Adam called a halt to it and his men began to advance on the center trench.

The paratroopers reached their target close to midnight. “Three batteries of field-guns were silenced in a matter of minutes,” Yael Dayan recorded. The paras next ambushed a convoy of reinforcement trucks and destroyed them. One, however, was loaded with artillery ammunition, and in the explosion three Israelis were killed and many more wounded.

The two tank brigades also surged forward, from their opposite vectors, at around midnight and began engaging the Egyptian armor in earnest. The whole night and into the morning, Sharon orchestrated the battle by radio.

While the battle still raged, he received an order from the CO of Southern Command, Shaike Gavish, to enable a brigade of Yoffe’s armor to pass through the complex on their dash west. “There below us on the main road,” Yael Dayan wrote, “as far as I could see, were a thousand headlights advancing rapidly towards us. Arik was standing erect in his command half-track, raising his hand to the horizon as if blessing the sight.” Sharon ordered his own tanks to stop firing, “and we were treated,” he writes, “to the remarkable sight of a brigade of tanks moving unscathed right through the two forces locked in combat.”

By mid-morning the fighting had died away. The whole complex was in Sharon’s hands. The price: 40 Israeli dead and 140 wounded. A high price, but the reward was high, too. “Our mission had been to open the main axis to our forces in Sinai, and we had now done that,” Sharon writes. He goes on to fault the High Command for procrastinating the whole day before deciding on his division’s next assignment.

On Wednesday morning, June 7, at any rate, the orders came through: Sharon was to head south for Nakhl, which he had taken in his charge across Sinai at the head of the paratroop brigade eleven years before. The assignment was to cut off an Egyptian division that had been deployed at Kuntilla on the Negev border and was now heading back west. “If the Egyptians succeeded in getting to the Mitle Pass before we hit them,” Sharon explains, “they could close off our advance to the canal.” Outside Nakhl, which was defended by a full brigade, the lead vehicles hit a minefield, and Sharon decided to defer the attack to Thursday morning.

They celebrated that night with the rest of the nation over the news that the Western Wall had been taken, along with the whole Old City of Jerusalem, held since 1948 by Jordan.^d Mordechai Gur, Sharon’s subordinate who had turned against him after the Mitle in 1956, led the paratroopers who liberated this holiest site in Judaism after a bloody battle outside the city ramparts.

When the tanks surged into Nakhl at dawn, they found the fortified complex deserted. “Everything was in place,” Sharon writes. “Tents were up, self-propelled guns were ready to move, artillery and mortars dug in and ready to fire. Everything was there except the people. We called it the ‘ghost brigade.’ ”

The division from Kuntilla, however, was fast approaching, chased by an IDF armored brigade that had been deployed defensively in the Negev at the start of the war but now crossed into Sinai to join the battle. “With a brigade of tanks, a reinforced battalion of half-tracks, and the divisional reconnaissance unit, I set an ambush for the fleeing Egyptians,” Sharon recorded. “The Egyptian Sixth Division entered a terrible killing field … For miles the desert was covered by ruined tanks and burned-out armored personnel carriers. Bodies littered the ground, and here and there across the scene groups of Egyptians were standing with their hands behind their heads … By [evening] the Sixth Division had ceased to exist.”²⁶ This time, the Centurions and Shermans were supported by frontline jets that swooped down, pouring napalm and cannon fire onto the Egyptian column.

The desert was teeming with Egyptian soldiers desperate to get back, many of them without water in the blazing summer heat. The orders were to enable—later it became actively to assist and facilitate—the return across the canal of enlisted men, while officers were to be taken prisoner. These—almost five thousand of them—were eventually exchanged for a handful of Israeli POWs and various spies and agents imprisoned in Egypt.

General Tal’s division had had similarly stunning success along the northern axis. Starting from south of Gaza City on the first day, it swept west along the coast to take el-Arish. On the second day, as its forward units raced ahead toward central Sinai and the canal, other units swung back to conquer Gaza City and the rest of the Gaza Strip. Some writers attribute Dayan’s turnabout on Gaza to pressure from kibbutzim along the Gaza border that came under fire from inside the Strip. It is hard, though, to see how Gaza could have remained an unoccupied enclave once Israel was in occupation of the whole of Sinai (and of the entire West Bank). On the third and fourth days, Tal, too, fought major tank battles, on the Bir Gafgafa–Ismailia road. His units finally reached the canal at Ismailia and points north—again, contrary to Dayan’s original wishes.

The last two days of the Six-Day War were fought mainly between Israel and Syria, on the Golan Heights. Here, yet again, Dayan found his original intentions overturned by the pressure of events. The breathtaking speed and relative ease with which the IDF had smashed through the Egyptian divisions gave added weight to the demands of the kibbutzim beneath the Syrian escarpment to put an end to their sporadic shelling from the Syrian positions above. During the first four days of war the bombardment was incessant. Eshkol wavered, but Dayan was set against extending the war to Syria for fear of direct Soviet intervention. On Thursday night, though, he changed his mind. He gave David Elazar, the CO of Northern Command, two days—Soviet pressure for a cease-fire was already mounting—to push the Syrian army back across the escarpment on the top of the Golan Heights. The air force was available now for devastating close support. Armored reinforcements from Central Command were rushed up north to help. The fighting up the steep slopes of the Golan was brutal. But by midday Saturday the IDF was swarming across the plateau and digging in on a line anchored at Kuneitra, the main town on the Golan.

On Saturday, June 10, Sharon was summoned to meet with Gavish, the CO of Southern Command, and a helicopter was sent to pick him up. It developed engine trouble. “As we began to lose altitude,” he recalled, “small groups of [wandering Egyptian soldiers] began shooting at us, and we traded fire with them. Landing on the road, I wondered briefly what was going to happen to us. It was too ironic for words.”

Yisrael Tal took up the story in an interview years later:

I received an order to present myself immediately at Jebel Libni for a meeting of divisional commanders with the CO. A helicopter was sent to pick me up from Bir Gafgafa. During the flight I was glued to the window, staring out at the expanses of Sinai beneath us. I saw hundreds of Egyptian soldiers with their personal weapons fleeing west toward the canal. Among them, I saw a conspicuous figure, moving heavily along the dunes. I saw at once that it was Arik Sharon. I was rather concerned for his well-being. I told the pilot to land at once. I jumped out. Arik saw me and came running to the helicopter. He embraced me heartily and shouted above the din of the rotor, “Talik, we destroyed them.” I shouted back, “Get into the helicopter right now, before these Egyptians kill you.”²⁷

Click here to see a larger image.

At Jebel Libni there were more embraces with Gavish and Yoffe and posing for photographs. Then on to Tel Aviv to meet with Rabin. “Somehow Lily had learned that I was coming in and was waiting for me at the airport with Gur,” Sharon writes. “It was a wonderful surprise despite the fact that we would not have any time together. She drove me to General Headquarters … Our meeting with Rabin was full of congratulations and warmth.”

A week later, as the demobilization of the reserves wound down, Sharon flew home for his first real leave since the waiting period began a month before. It was, despite the mourning in some families and the suffering of the wounded, a triumphal return—for the army in general and for Sharon in particular. As he toured the Old City of Jerusalem with Lily and Gur, he was mobbed by well-wishers shouting his name, jostling to touch him and thank him. All the generals were instant heroes in those heady days, their photographs smiling out from magazine covers and victory albums. But he, somehow, seemed to attract special attention, to the chagrin of some of his colleagues. There was whispering that he and his friends had encouraged journalists, local and foreign, to cover his division to the exclusion of others. His trailer was depicted as something of a running buffet cum press conference. His name and voice seemed to appear all over, in print and on television, at home and abroad.

In the Diaspora, too, Jews basked in the glow of Israel’s victory, which many saw as a salvation from the threat of another Holocaust. The Six-Day War marks the beginning of the renaissance, muted and hesitant at first, of Jewish identity among the three-million-odd Jews of the Soviet Union, where both Zionism and Judaism had been suppressed for decades. In the United States, home to more than six million Jews, the war—both the fear before and the relief and pride after—finally put to rest a certain ambivalence that many Jews there felt toward the Jewish state, as though its existence somehow threatened their Americanism.

Before the war, Sharon would later recall, he sometimes took young Gur to Mount Zion, on the borderline between the Israeli and the Jordanian sections of Jerusalem. From the buildings on the mount they could peer over into the Old City. “ ‘Over there,’ I would say, ‘those places are not in our hands, but they are ours. They belong to us.’ ” Now he set out to show his oldest son the newly won territories. Many other Israeli families were doing the same that summer. “When they saw me, they would invariably gather around with congratulation, talk, and laughter. At these times I would look into Gur’s eyes. Although he never said anything, a proud happiness lit his face … Watching him, I too felt an immense pride.”

Sharon poured his love into the child, more especially since Gali’s death. “He really was the most enchanting child,” says Dalia Rabin, Yitzhak’s daughter. She was Gur’s group leader in the local scouts troop in Zahala. “He was the most beautiful boy in the group, and the most intelligent. I was at his funeral. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”

Gur died in his father’s arms, shot through the head by an antique gun he had taken down from the wall to play with together with a friend in the yard. “ ‘I’ll be out in the front,’ he told me, then turned around to leave. Just before he did, he gave me a playful salute, the gesture of a boy who had grown up around the army and who liked military things.”

For the stricken, anguished father, the point was critical. Gur had been around guns all his life and knew how to handle them. Sharon never accepted the version of the other, older boy that Gur had shot himself by accident. Omri, then three and a half, and baby Gilad witnessed the accident. “He told the boy not to point,” Sharon, in his account of the tragedy, recalls Omri saying. “Gur told the boy not to point it.”²⁸

It was the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Lily had taken the car to go shopping. Sharon lifted the boy and ran out, screaming for help. A car stopped and sped with them to the local clinic and from there to the hospital. “I had seen so many wounds in my life; no one had to tell me that this one was hopeless … I sat in the back seat with Gur on my lap, my shirt soaked with his blood. Ages seemed to pass as we raced to the hospital. And as we did, he died in my arms.

“In keeping with Jewish law, the funeral would have to be held before sundown … They put him in a simple pine coffin, and I asked them to open it for a minute. I looked at him again, then watched as they closed the lid … Standing in front of the grave [alongside Gali’s], I remembered five and a half years ago … that I had said, ‘The only thing that I can promise you is that I will take care of Gur.’ Now I could not shake the thought that I had not kept my promise … I didn’t take care of him. I just didn’t take care of him.

“For the first time in my life,” Sharon wrote, “I felt I was facing something that I could not overcome, that I could not live through.” His friend Uri Dan remembers him saying at this time that life would have no meaning anymore. He hired the attorney Shmuel Tamir to demand that the police conduct a full inquiry. “I’m sure Gur didn’t shoot himself,” he told the lawyer. “I don’t want to sue anyone. I just want all the facts to be investigated and the police to be convinced that Gur didn’t pull the trigger.” The other boy’s family claimed he had held the gun first but that Gur had taken it and looked down the barrel, and then it fired. Tamir studied all the ballistic and other evidence, “and in light of the facts I presented, the police investigators accepted Arik’s version.”²⁹ Nevertheless, Sharon would sometimes hurl accusations at the other boy on the street. The boy was the son of an air force pilot. His mother wrote to the chief of staff, Haim Bar-Lev, to complain about this harassment, and Bar-Lev called in Sharon to try to talk to him. Eventually, the boy and his family moved out of the district.³⁰

Sharon pulled through emotionally, thanks in large part to Lily. “The hardest times were at night,” he writes, “when sleep was impossible and the scene played and replayed itself in my head. Awake during the nights, Lily and I cried together. During the day there was work, then at home if we did not talk about it we could hold the pain inside. But once we would start to talk, it was impossible to put a barrier to the tears. Neither of us could find any comfort or relief from the terrible grief.”

Lily nevertheless often complained over the years to their friend—who had been Gali’s friend and now, with the two tragic deaths in the family, grew ever closer to Lily—that Arik refused to talk about Gur, that he kept his bereavement bottled up. In the trunk of his car he carried a rake, a hoe, and a watering can. When he passed the graveyard, he would take them out, tend the double grave site, and shed a silent tear.³¹ He organized an annual horse race in memory of his boy, who loved to ride; but he never spoke, even there, about Gur.³²

Once, many years later, he let a rare shaft of light into this dark place in his soul. It was during an interview as prime minister on Israel TV Channel 2 in 2003. Looking at family snapshots, the interviewer, Rafi Reshef, gingerly referred to Gur. “He looks like a lovely boy,” he ventured.

“Yes, he really was a lovely boy,” the prime minister replied.

A boy with special leadership qualities. Very able. An excellent horseman. He took part in riding competitions. He was eleven years old when he was killed. At first, the blow hits you a thousand times a second. Later, it still keeps on hitting you all the time. If you ask me—there isn’t a day that I don’t think about it. But if you’re doing things—believe me, I don’t know how a blow like this affects people who aren’t busy doing things, and just live with their bereavement all the time—if you’re doing things all the time, it helps you to cope … It’s not that it doesn’t hurt. You can see it hurts. But I have inside me an ability to overcome very, very difficult things.

WEST BANK, EAST BANK

Arik Sharon’s efforts to colonize the captured territories, which were to preoccupy him for much of the remainder of his public life, began before the Six-Day War had even ended. “As soon as I heard that Samaria and Judea were liberated,” he wrote in Warrior, “I had cabled instructions to the commander of the infantry school to move from the base in Netanya to a captured Jordanian army camp near Shechem. That was the first one I moved.”

“Shechem,” which Sharon deliberately used in his English text, is the biblical Hebrew name for the large West Bank town known in Arabic and English as Nablus. The religious and nationalistic yearnings to annex the West Bank were reinforced from the outset of this decades-long and still unresolved political struggle by the less biblical, more rational contention that the territories were crucial for Israel’s defense. Given the enmity of the surrounding Arab states, it was argued, Israel was indefensible in its pre–Six-Day War borders. At one point, opposite Netanya on the Mediterranean coast, the country was less than ten miles wide.

Settlements, usually kibbutzim and moshavim, had been Zionism’s way of staking out its claim to the land from its earliest days. After independence in 1948, the leadership continued to see settlements along the borders—inhabited first by soldier-farmers, then by immigrant-farmers—as the surest way to secure and solidify the 1948 armistice lines.

This settlement tradition, espoused mainly by the Labor Zionists who had dominated Jewish life and politics in Palestine both before and after independence, was now almost naturally espoused by all those who sought, for religious, nationalist, or security reasons—for many of them, it was an amalgam of all three—to perpetuate Israel’s control over the West Bank (and the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and strategic parts of Sinai).

Right from the start, though, such settlement ran into Arab and international opposition. The Arabs saw it, correctly, as a strategy ultimately designed to expand the borders of Israel at their expense. In November 1967 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242 requiring Israel’s “withdrawal … from territories occupied in the recent conflict” and at the same time acknowledging “the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” Israel argued that the resolution did not specify withdrawal from “all the territories” or even from “the territories”—just from “territories,” meaning there was scope for adjustments. These needed to be negotiated between the parties, Israel maintained; that was the meaning of “secure and recognized boundaries.”

Much of Israeli policy in the years and decades that followed the Six-Day War has been focused—though this was not often articulated—on how to avoid, allay, or weather international disapproval of Israeli settlement in the post-1967 territories while at the same time allowing the settlements to multiply and grow. “Allowing” covers a multitude of nuanced attitudes adopted over the years by various Israeli governments, of various ideological persuasions, to the diplomatic and legal problems posed by settlements and, in more recent years, to the domestic political power wielded by the growing settler constituency.

Sharon was brilliantly quick in grasping the dilemmas inherent in the Israeli yearning to settle the newly acquired territories—and in devising the first solution to get around them: army training camps. As the head of training, he was perfectly placed to implement his solution, which turned out to be no less than historic in affecting the course of the Israeli-Arab conflict for decades ahead. “Within a few months I was able to transfer quite a few [of the military training schools]: the infantry school, the engineering school, the military police school, part of the artillery school, the main basic training school for new recruits, the paratrooper recruit school, and others.”

These military schools usually took over strategically positioned and now abandoned Arab Legion camps. But—and this was the long-term point—they naturally grew in size, and some became in time the nuclei of large civilian settlements in the populated Palestinian heartlands. At first, these civilian settlements were ostensibly mere adjuncts of the army bases, inhabited by people who provided various necessary services to the base. Gradually, though, they filled out, with families, with other settlers more loosely connected to the neighboring base, and finally with settlers not connected at all to the base, which by this time had itself become the adjunct of a swiftly expanding settlement.

If it had been up to Prime Minister Eshkol, there might well have been a deal with Jordan. King Hussein kept up discreet contacts with Israel despite the “Khartoum Noes.”^e But Dayan, the defense minister, was loath to cede the West Bank, theorizing instead about a “functional” sharing of sovereignty. Another key figure in the government, Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, compiled a plan for the return of most of the West Bank to Jordan but with Israel keeping the Jordan valley, the area around Jerusalem, and a strip running along the narrow sections of the pre-1967 line.

The Allon Plan, as it became known, was always rejected by the king. But it became the effective blueprint for civilian settlement in the territories during the ten years of Labor rule that followed the war. Settlement was encouraged along the torrid and inhospitable Jordan valley, around Jerusalem, and at sites close to the former borderline. This was apart from large housing projects for Jews in East—that is, formerly Jordanian—Jerusalem. Israel formally annexed the eastern part of the city and sizable swaths of land around it immediately after the war, declaring the much-enlarged municipality its eternal and indivisible capital.

The “national camp,” still a minority but growing, never acquiesced in the Labor governments’ limitations on Jewish settlement. Partisan settlement efforts were sporadically attempted in areas beyond the Allon Plan, and, as we shall see, some took root during Yitzhak Rabin’s first government (1974–1977). Sharon’s training bases with their seeds of civilian adjuncts grew to become a means for the government and the army to circumvent their own Allon Plan restrictions.

Though severely mauled and deeply humiliated, Egypt was not giving up the long-term struggle against Israel. The occupation of Sinai and the paralysis of the Suez Canal—once again, as in 1956, Egypt deliberately sank ships in the waterway—made that struggle now all the more pressing. On June 22, 1967, barely two weeks after the defeat, Nasser told the Soviet president, “Because the Israelis are now in Sinai, we are building up our defences on the west bank of the Canal. If the Israelis refuse to leave peacefully, sooner or later we’ll have to fight them to get them out.”³³

Even before the war was over, Nasser’s Soviet patrons began pouring in new arms to replenish Egypt’s stockpiles. New and better planes and tanks arrived in the following months, accompanied by more than a thousand Soviet advisers to help assimilate them. In September, the Arab League, meeting in Khartoum, vowed “No recognition, No negotiation, No peace” with Israel.

As if to demonstrate how vigorous and unbowed they still were, the Egyptians torpedoed and sank an Israeli destroyer off Port Said on October 21, 1967. Israel retaliated by shelling oil refineries and petrochemical plants at Suez. After this exchange, a tense quiet settled on the front for the following year. But President Nasser and his generals made it clear that once their army was fully refurbished, they intended to resume active hostilities and engage Israel in a sustained “war of attrition” on the canal front.

The first installment came unannounced on September 8, 1968. “The Egyptians launched a massive artillery attack on the sector from Kantara northward,” writes Major General Avraham “Bren” Adan in his Yom Kippur War memoir, On the Banks of the Suez. “Our troops entered their defensive bunkers, but these had been prepared very amateurishly. Many were easily penetrated by the Egyptian artillery shells. So we suffered ten killed and eighteen wounded in one day, a heavy price by Israeli standards. This artillery barrage came as a surprise and jolted the IDF Headquarters … On October 26 there was another massive Egyptian artillery barrage, this time across the entire front line and over a period of nine hours. Fifteen of our men were killed and thirty-four wounded.”³⁴

Chief of Staff Bar-Lev now ordered General Adan, “at the head of an inter-service team, to bring to the General Staff a proposal for the creation of a defensive system in Sinai.”³⁵ Chaim Herzog, a leading military historian and a future president of the state, treads ever so carefully as he recounts the beginnings of the “Bar-Lev Line,” the defensive system in Sinai that was the focus of huge controversy four years later, at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War.

The question was a classic one: Was the IDF to defend Sinai from the water’s edge, which would mean building much stronger fortifications along the canal, or was it to rely on mobile defensive forces deployed farther back, beyond effective artillery range? Adan’s team was to consult with the CO of Southern Command, Shaike Gavish. But, Herzog hints, Gavish’s mind was already made up. “Gavish came to the conclusion that it would be advisable to hold positions on the waterfront, particularly at all points which were probable crossing areas for the Egyptians. Furthermore, since the Israeli concept invariably called for mounting a counter-offensive into the enemy’s territory, it was important for [the Israelis] to sit in force along the Canal itself and not be in a position which would require fighting before they reached it.”

Adan’s final recommendation, which was adopted, was “a combination of the two systems of defense”: position defense and mobile defense. He insists in his book that the strongpoints along the canal “were never planned to prevent a canal crossing or serve as a defensive line. They were only a warning line. The defensive role would fall to the armored forces in reserve.”

Sharon presents a very different story. In his account, Adan’s series of fortifications, or ma’ozim, fortresses, as they were called in Hebrew, were designed both to serve as forward observation posts and “to help stop the Egyptians on the water line, before they could establish any significant presence in the Sinai.” He and Tal, alone among the generals, Sharon writes, consistently and unequivocally opposed this concept and argued in favor of a mobile defense.^f

The crescendo came in April 1969. “During one of our regular Monday General Headquarters meetings … a particularly acrimonious exchange erupted…[F]or Bar-Lev it was apparently the last straw. That same evening he called a second meeting,” Sharon recalls.

When I walked [in]…I saw Moshe Dayan sitting there together with his deputy. Alongside them were Bar-Lev and every single one of my most vehement critics…

Gavish … started things off with a wild attack that was personal as well as professional. While he was still speaking, I stood up and said, “I thought we were here to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the Bar-Lev Line. That’s the reason for this meeting and that’s what I’m willing to participate in, so that I can tell you again what a dangerous and stupid idea it is …”

Dayan cut in. “Arik, you’ve been invited to a General Headquarters meeting. It’s not up to you to decide what’s going to be discussed.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but if you proceed with this, it’s going to be without me.”

When I sat down, everything was quiet for a moment; then Gavish took up right where he had left off. With that I got up again, announced that I wouldn’t take part in it, then walked toward the door. Behind me I heard Dayan’s, “Arik, you can’t do that. You have to come back. Come back!” The door slamming behind me cut off his voice.

As I walked down the corridor, I knew with absolute certainty that I was right and they were wrong, that the Bar-Lev Line was bound to bring us disaster. But it was no pleasure when four years later it did exactly that.

A few days after the door-slamming episode, an officer from the adjutant general’s office phoned to ask how Sharon wanted to receive his accumulated leave—as vacation or in cash. Bar-Lev, he learned, would not approve a further extension of his contract. He appealed to Dayan, only to be told, “Bar-Lev doesn’t want you; I don’t see how I can interfere.” Golda Meir, the new prime minister (Eshkol had died suddenly in February 1969), also declined to step in on his behalf.

Sharon now conducted a brief but very public flirt with leaders of the parliamentary opposition. Was he just posturing in order to put pressure on Golda and the government to overrule Bar-Lev? Or was he seriously preparing to embark on a political career? Unsurprisingly, Sharon himself endorses the latter version. But even if he was being disingenuous, his account is entertaining:

At the age of forty-one I was not exactly ready for pipe and slippers.

As I thought about it, political life came to seem more and more attractive. I certainly had ideas … and 1969 was an election year. At that time I had two good friends in the political world with whom I occasionally talked about such things. One was Pinchas Sapir, the minister of finance and an important Labor party leader … He was from Kfar Saba, quite near my parents’ farm, and I had known him from childhood.

The other was Josef Sapir (no relation to Pinchas), the head of the Liberal party. I had known him too since I was young. He had been born into a family of citrus growers in Petach Tikva … and when I was a child I occasionally went with my father to their farm to get graftings for our own trees.

Since 1965, Sapir’s Liberals had been in alliance with Menachem Begin’s Herut Party in an electoral bloc called Gahal,^g a first attempt at creating a credible alternative to Labor. Sapir took Sharon to see Begin.

My meeting with Begin and Sapir took place in the King David Hotel, in a chilly air-conditioned room whose windows looked out on the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. It was a cordial meeting. But as the talk went on, I began to feel a cold sweat forming on my back. In later years my relationship with Begin evolved considerably. But during this meeting I was more than a little uncomfortable. Although the discussion was friendly, there was something about the way Begin spoke, and especially the way he looked at me. The man had an extraordinarily powerful presence. And as he spoke, from minute to minute I had more of a feeling that I was getting involved in something I could not control…

He was talking about how I would be included with them in the election, and that if we were successful I would join them in the government, all the things that I had supposed I wanted to hear. But as he spoke, I became more and more aware of the man’s strength and determination. Peering through his thick glasses, his eyes seemed to bore into me. I began to picture myself as Pinocchio when he got involved with the cat who wasn’t blind and the fox who wasn’t lame. But despite my growing if intangible misgivings, the discussion proceeded, and eventually we agreed to go ahead together. With that, Mr. Begin in his gallant way called room service and had a good brandy sent up. Then we drank to our understanding. But even as we raised our glasses, I felt that I was locked in and that I was locked in with someone about whom I had inexplicable feelings of apprehension.

The date was July 3, 1969. Election Day was October 28, and by law the parties’ lists of candidates had to be submitted a hundred days ahead, by mid-July. As Sharon tells it, the understanding with Begin did not survive his drive back to Tel Aviv. He picked up a soldier-hitchhiker, who, “without paying the slightest deference to my rank or reputation … began telling me that I was making a terrible mistake, that I shouldn’t do it, that I had to stay in the army … Lily was waiting for me, in bed already. I got in and covered myself up with the blanket. ‘Lily,’ I said, ‘I feel as if I need to be protected.’ I had already decided that I was not going to go through with it.”

The next morning’s headlines trumpeted the Begin-Sharon understanding. Sharon writes that he was in the act of composing embarrassing letters of withdrawal to Sapir and Begin when “fate intervened in my personal affairs…Pinchas Sapir was visiting the United States. When he heard about the newspaper headlines, he was livid. Calling Bar-Lev, Sapir asked the military’s most prominent Laborite^h what he thought he was doing (as Sapir himself told me later)…Sapir told Bar-Lev to get busy and find some way of keeping me in the army and out of the hands of the ‘enemy.’ ”

A way was duly, and quickly, found. He would be appointed to the hitherto nonexistent post of “lecturer for the IDF” and sent on an extended speaking tour to the United States, Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. He would meet, too, with military and diplomatic officials in the various capitals. This eight-week foreign odyssey would end, by happy coincidence, the day before the election. He would thus be conveniently out of the country during the campaign, and everyone could forget his high-profile but now felicitously truncated tryst with the opposition.

He wrote a formal, pompous letter to Begin and Sapir explaining that after long and hard consideration he had decided that “in these difficult days, when the IDF is at war along the borders and its soldiers are shedding their blood in defense of Israel’s freedom and independence,” his place was “alongside them, and in the front line.” To Josef Sapir he wrote a separate note, apologizing for the embarrassment and hinting at the unfavorable impact Begin had made on him. He was determined, he confided, not to enter political life “in a state of dependence on [Begin].”³⁶

After the election, with Golda and Dayan and Sapir all safely back in their jobs, Bar-Lev obediently deposited the country’s most fateful front, Southern Command, in the hands of the man he had wanted to fire. “In December,” Sharon writes, “I received orders to take over Gavish’s command.”

Sharon seems to have persuaded Bar-Lev that whatever his past objections he would abide by the strategy that the High Command had decided upon, and to a large extent had already implemented, with the rapid fortification of the forward positions along the canal. Most of the fortification work had been finished before the War of Attrition began in earnest, in March 1969. Sharon did not abandon the fortress system and based the defense of Sinai on mobile forces, as Tal and he had advocated.ⁱ As CO of Southern Command, he tinkered with the Bar-Lev Line and ended up, in the words of Chaim Herzog, with “a form of compromise … which no military concept could accept.” Far from abandoning the line of strongpoints, Sharon ordered many of them rebuilt and reinforced after the battering they took in the War of Attrition. In time, though, he persuaded Elazar, who succeeded Bar-Lev as IDF chief of staff on January 1, 1972, to let him “thin out” the line by closing some—by the end it was fourteen—of the thirty-two strongpoints.

In addition, he embarked on a massive building program of eleven underground fortifications in the hills some miles to the rear, where the massed armor and artillery were to be deployed that would ultimately defend Sinai in the face of an Egyptian crossing. He called these fortresses “ta’ozim, strongholds, to distinguish them from the ma’ozim, strongpoints,” on the canal bank. “Here I put command and long-range surveillance posts, underground bunkers, firing positions, bases for forward reserve units, and emplacements for artillery.”³⁷

By mid-April 1970, the Israeli positions were being subjected not only to artillery barrages but also to attacks by Egyptian commando units crossing the canal in fast boats under cover of darkness. Israel responded with commando raids of its own, some deep inside Egypt. In one such raid, on July 28, paratroopers and naval commandos set down on the tiny, heavily defended Green Island, near the southern end of the canal in the Gulf of Suez, and destroyed key Egyptian radar and anti-aircraft installations housed there. This gave the air force freer rein to deploy above the Canal Zone as a sort of flying artillery, targeting Egyptian emplacements and armor.

In September, a force of Israeli infantry and armor was ferried across the Gulf of Suez to the port of Zafarana, from where it attacked and overran Egyptian positions along twenty miles of coastline in eight hours of sustained fighting before re-embarking. In December, just before Sharon took over, heli-borne commandos dismantled and transported back to the Israeli side a state-of-the-art Soviet radar system deployed at Ras Arab, also on the west bank of the gulf. And in January 1970, under the new CO a commando force overran Shadwan Island, 155 miles down the Gulf of Suez, killed or captured all of the hundred-man Egyptian garrison, and again made off with radar units and other military hardware.

Both sides now made moves that dangerously escalated the War of Attrition. Israel, worn down by the incessant toll of casualties on the canal, embarked on a policy of deep-penetration bombing raids against strategic targets throughout Egypt. President Nasser, acutely conscious of his vulnerability to Israeli airpower, demanded from his Soviet patrons a drastic upgrading of Egypt’s own air force and its anti-aircraft defenses, along with Soviet pilots and experts to help man the sophisticated new systems he wanted. In the first months of 1970, the Soviet presence in Egypt doubled and tripled, reaching more than twelve thousand men. Israeli pilots, some of them now flying American-supplied Skyhawk and Phantom warplanes, were ordered to back off from dogfights rather than risk downing Soviet airmen.

Israel’s deep bombing campaign came to a peremptory end in April, when Phantom jets mistakenly bombed an elementary school, killing forty-seven children and injuring another fifty. The focus of the fighting returned to the Canal Zone, where the Egyptians, with Soviet help, were trying under the cover of almost constant artillery exchanges to deploy their Soviet SAM anti-aircraft missile batteries right up to the water’s edge. On July 30, the undesired but inevitable dogfight took place and resulted in the downing of four Soviet-piloted MiGs and the deaths of the four pilots.

The escalation added urgency to U.S. diplomatic efforts to reach a peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, or, failing that, at least an end of the present round of fighting. The Nixon administration had been actively trying to broker a peace deal through Four Power (United States, U.S.S.R., Britain, and France) and Two Power (United States and U.S.S.R.) talks. These had failed to cut through Cold War rivalry, but in December 1969 Secretary of State William Rogers had announced a comprehensive American peace plan based on Israeli withdrawal from all Egyptian and Jordanian territory barring “minor adjustments” in the framework of a peace settlement. Golda Meir’s government, still a unity coalition with Begin’s Gahal in it, had rejected the proposal. Now, with the war at a global danger point, Rogers came back with a more modest plan, designed to achieve an immediate cease-fire in Sinai.

The American proposal had three parts: a ninety-day cease-fire and “standstill” in place for thirty miles on either side of the canal; a statement by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan that they accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242 and specifically its call for withdrawal from occupied territories; and an undertaking to resume peace talks through the UN peace envoy, Sweden’s Gunnar Jarring, which had been conducted on and off since 1967 without registering any progress.

Golda Meir was under heavy international and domestic pressure to accept. Casualty figures mounted relentlessly. Since the end of the Six-Day War, 367 IDF soldiers had been killed on the canal front and 1,366 injured.³⁸ Almost daily, the black-bordered death notices appeared in the newspapers. The fact that Egyptian casualties were much higher was of no comfort and little strategic significance. As Nasser and his generals had rightly discerned at the outset, a war of attrition for a small, tightly knit society was much more damaging than for a country of tens of millions.

For the first time since the waiting period before the 1967 war, searching questions began to be aired not just on the leftist margin but in the political mainstream. In late July–early August, Israel, Egypt, and Jordan all announced their acceptance of the U.S. proposal. The cease-fire on the canal went into effect on August 7, 1970. Begin pulled his Gahal bloc out of the government, ending three years of unity rule.

Egypt, with Soviet connivance, immediately began advancing its SAM anti-aircraft batteries toward the canal bank, in brazen violation of the “standstill.” The Egyptian push began on the very night of the cease-fire and continued in the days and weeks ahead. Israel strenuously protested to Washington, but the administration was reluctant to upend the cease-fire. Nixon preferred to step up the supply of advanced warplanes to Israel as a means of mollifying the anger and anxiety in Jerusalem.

Egypt’s War of Attrition was supported by its Six-Day War allies, Syria and Jordan, through the activities from their soil of Palestinian guerrilla groups. Immediately after the war, the Palestinian nationalist group Fatah, under Yasser Arafat, tried to establish itself inside the occupied West Bank and lead resistance there. But it was eventually pushed out and forced to conduct its operations against Israel on a hit-and-run basis from over the border. Soon, Arafat was acting in defiance of Jordanian constraints. Increasingly, the armed Palestinian presence on the East Bank began to pose a threat to the stability of the Hashemite kingdom.

In September 1970, after two attempts on his life, King Hussein of Jordan lashed out at the armed PLO units that were running the border areas and the Palestinian refugee camps inside the kingdom as a veritable state within a state. The Arab Legion, comprising Bedouin tribesmen loyal to the royal house, crushed the PLO men and took a bloody toll of civilian camp dwellers, too. Hundreds of the armed Palestinians fled across the river, where IDF troops were ordered not to shoot them or send them back but to disarm and arrest them, “although,” Sharon writes with evident disapproval, “these were the very terrorists who had carried out who knew how many murderous raids into Israel.”

He voiced strident disapproval when Israel acceded to an urgent American request to mobilize its army in the face of a Syrian invasion of northern Jordan in support of the hard-pressed Palestinians. Israeli armor moved demonstratively into the Beisan valley, poised to cross into Jordan. The Syrians withdrew. “The resolution to this crisis was considered a success by the Americans and the Jordanians,” Sharon writes. “Most Israelis were also pleased with the outcome. But I was not one of them.” To most Israelis, guided by their government, the Hashemite house, formerly a British fiefdom and now an American client, was infinitely to be preferred as a neighbor to a Soviet-backed radical Palestinian state. But not to Sharon, as he argued vehemently but to no avail in the army High Command. Granted, he said, a Palestinian state in place of Jordan would probably remain hostile to Israel. “But the discussion will be about where the border should be. We will be arguing with them about territorial matters. We will no longer be dealing with the issue of Palestinian identity and about their right to a political expression of their identity.”

This kind of bold, heterodox thinking about the Palestinian problem was the province in Israel at that time only of the Far Left. Prime Minister Meir blithely insisted that there was no Palestinian nation and therefore no need to grant it political expression. In the eyes of almost everyone in government and in the defense establishment, the disposition of the West Bank continued to be the business of its two neighbors: Israel and Jordan. Sharon’s dissent from this article of faith would have reinforced his image in the eyes of the Labor old guard as a maverick, and a dangerously unpredictable one at that. Certainly it would not have improved his prospects, which he believed still existed, of ever being appointed chief of staff.

BRUTE FORCE

While the Suez front was the most significant area of Sharon’s responsibility as CO of Southern Command, his tenure in that key post was overshadowed by two high-profile controversies that erupted far from the canal front line. The pattern was something of a throwback to the 1950s: Again he was carrying out government policy. Again he was doing so with excessive, wanton brutality. Again he was the convenient lightning rod to absorb and deflect criticism. And again his superiors—most especially Dayan—covered for him and protected him from serious fallout. Another episode in which his behavior was even crueler and more culpable never even became a controversy: it was hushed up at the time and has remained suppressed ever since.

With the canal front (deceptively) quiet after the August 1970 cease-fire, Sharon could spend much time during the next eighteen months focusing on Gaza. He had the territory mapped into small squares and deployed infantry teams in each square. “It is your job to know this square inside and out,” he told them, “and it is your job to find and kill every terrorist in it.” A shadowy unit, Rimon, commanded by a longtime Sharon acolyte, Meir Dagan,^j drew veiled—and largely censored—criticism for shooting or hurling grenades first and asking questions later, or not at all. A particular source of criticism and controversy was the widespread use that Sharon’s troops made of bulldozers, both in the fields and orchards and in the narrow alleys of the refugee camps. Trees and crops often fell before the bulldozers, as did many hundreds of modest homes, often hardly more than hovels, of many thousands of innocent people who found themselves in the path of Sharon’s drive against the terrorists. The curfews clapped down on the camps, often for days on end as the soldiers went about their search-and-destroy missions, and the hours-long lineups imposed on the menfolk were also widely seen as forms of collective punishment.

In February 1972, Dayan publicly praised Sharon for the Gaza operation. But he went on to announce that the Strip would now come under the aegis of Central Command, effective immediately. Ze’ev Schiff wrote in Haaretz that “there may be reservations about Gen. Sharon’s military methods, but the fact is that this commander has eliminated terror in Gaza … Sharon’s determination, and perhaps, too, his lack of consideration of many things, have immeasurably improved the security situation there. Militarily, he leaves Gaza victorious.”³⁹

When ministers and Knesset members would come visiting Gaza, Sharon took them to the sand dunes overlooking the coast and urged the creation of blocs of Jewish settlements—“fingers,” as he called them—between the major centers of Palestinian population. The concept evolved in government and military circles, moreover, that Israel needed to plant a permanent presence in the Rafah Salient, westward beyond the Gaza-Sinai border, in order to create a cordon sanitaire between Gaza and Egypt. Sharon claims that he was the progenitor of this strategic theory. It was vital for Israel, in his words, “to create a Jewish buffer between Gaza and the Sinai in order to cut off the flow of smuggled weapons and—looking forward to a future settlement with Egypt—to divide the two regions.”

Progenitor or not, Sharon was the enthusiastic executor of the first stage of the scheme: ejecting the existing tenants. “It wouldn’t be a bad thing if there were no Arabs here,” Dayan mused to Sharon one day as they both flew over the Rafah Salient by helicopter. “Then we could fence the whole area and turn it into a security zone.”^40k That was enough for Sharon. Within days, some ten thousand Bedouin, most of them members of the Romeilah tribe and most of them not nomads but sedentary farmers long established in the area, were summarily ousted by soldiers of Southern Command.

The soldiers arrived unannounced at dawn on January 14, 1972, nine Bedouin sheikhs later recounted in their petition to the High Court of Justice.^l They ordered the entire community to leave at once. They cited security grounds. That same day, according to the court depositions, the soldiers began physically demolishing the Bedouin’s homes and outhouses. People were pushed around, and property was smashed and ruined. The eviction took several days. Once the Bedouin were all out, the army fenced off an area of some nineteen square miles to prevent them from getting back in.

The episode might have remained unknown, as Sharon (and Dayan?) apparently intended, had it not been for the protests of a few reservists, members of Mapam kibbutzim along the border who had witnessed the forcible evictions, and for the pointed inquiries of Red Cross officials. In mid-February, David Elazar, who succeeded Bar-Lev as chief of staff on January 1, set up an internal inquiry under General Aharon Yariv, the former head of Military Intelligence, to investigate the complaints.

Yariv focused on the decision to fence off areas of the Rafah Salient. Sharon admitted that he had given that order without explicit authorization from the chief of staff or the minister of defense. Yariv duly submitted his report. Elazar made do with a letter of reprimand to Sharon. A junior officer and a civilian were more severely punished: the officer was transferred; the civilian was dismissed. The military censorship kept a tight lid on the whole affair.

On the left, nevertheless, the controversy rumbled on for months, replete with demonstrations, counterdemonstrations, and angry articles in the press. The editor of the Labor Party’s weekly, Ot, David Shaham, wrote an editorial demanding that the “very senior officer” be dismissed. What would happen in a normal country, Shaham asked, if an army commander went ahead and implemented a contingency plan without getting authorization from his civilian bosses? “Surely he would be appropriately punished.”

This drew a rare and spirited defense of Sharon—still unnamed—by Moshe Dayan. The article was “wild and irresponsible incitement,” he told the party central committee. The author did not know the facts and had not even heard the officer whose dismissal he was demanding. Neither the army’s judge advocate general nor the attorney general had recommended legal or disciplinary action against Sharon.⁴¹ Dayan demanded that Shaham, not the “very senior officer,” be dismissed. Golda Meir rammed through a resolution requiring Ot to appoint an editorial board. Shaham was effectively neutered.

The government meanwhile announced that it would pay compensation to the Bedouin and help resettle them on nearby tracts of land, some inside the Gaza Strip. In the Knesset, the minister without portfolio Yisrael Galili, Golda’s shadowy but powerful adviser, said that the government regarded the Gaza Strip and the adjoining Rafah Salient as territory that would remain under Israeli rule forever. Gaza thus now joined Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Jordan valley, and Sharm el-Sheikh in the list of places from which Israel proposed never to withdraw. This was a fairly momentous announcement and a remarkably backhanded way of making it. Within a few years, a string of Jewish agricultural settlements were up and thriving in the Rafah Salient area, along with a regional center, Yamit, which provided schools and services for the settlers.

Once again, Sharon was conveniently, indeed avidly available to “do the dirty work” of government policy and to take the heat from the humane Left. The eviction and the enclosure were decided above his pay grade. His methods of executing the decisions had been gratuitously excessive. But a thick blanket of censorship and political protection ensured that he emerged from the episode unscathed.

An infinitely thicker blanket, still unlifted to the present day, was required to shield Sharon from the consequences of another, much more heinous act of violence that he perpetrated at this same time against other tribes of Bedouin, deeper inside Sinai. Again it was a peremptory, forcible expulsion. Only this time it resulted in dozens of deaths, including of children and old people who died of exposure in the freezing desert night.

This time, there was no inquiry, no public outcry, no angry articles. There was a total, comprehensive cover-up, then and thereafter. The military censorship made sure that nothing was published. The chief of staff and at least one other general, Shlomo Gazit, the IDF’s coordinator of operations in the territories, took no action against Sharon when they learned the shocking details of this episode. Presumably, Minister of Defense Dayan and probably Golda, too, knew of the outrage. Both of them visited the scene where it happened.

It took place on the night of January 12, 1972, with additional expulsions on the twentieth and the twenty-sixth, in the area of Sinai around Abu Agheila, about eighteen miles west of the Israeli border and twenty-eight miles south of the coast at el-Arish. This time the victims were some three thousand members of the Tarabin and Tiya’ha tribes, mainly nomads whose traditional camping grounds were in the area of Abu Agheila, north and south of Jebel Halal.

On January 12, a couple of jeep patrols from Southern Command cruised around the Bedouin encampments informing whomever they encountered that all the Bedouin were to be out of the area by the following morning. They left before sunset. When units of jeep-borne and camel-borne soldiers descended on the Bedouin after dark to enforce the order, some tried to argue. One sheikh said he would not move his tribe unless he received a formal, written order from the military governor of Sinai. The camel riders began tearing out tent poles and threatening to shoot. The same methods of persuasion were used in other encampments. The Bedouin began their trek the same night.

The temperature in Sinai that night, according to the Government Meteorological Office, was two degrees Celsius. On January 26, when other encampments in the area were expelled in this same way, it was zero. “Most of the Beduin did not possess sufficient animals to carry their families, their tents and their food,” according to a detailed report submitted three months later to the chief of staff by an independent researcher. “As a result, they had to leave much of their property behind. As a result, too, old people were forced to walk. Many had to carry infants on their backs, or the infants had to trudge through the freezing sands. Many just slumped down and wept. When they reached their assigned destination [in one case some thirty-one miles to the south] many were unable to set up any kind of shelter for their families.

“As a result of their exertions and of exposure many became ill. People of all ages died, by rough assessment more than forty. I myself counted 23 fresh graves at Jebel Jahem and five more at Wadi Seiseb. I heard from the Beduin that others were buried elsewhere.”

The author of the report, a young American-born scholar of Bedouin life and lore named Dr. Clinton Bailey, attached a photograph of a line of tiny graves of infants who did not survive the transfer. He took his story first to General Gazit, “but nothing was done.” He took it to a well-known journalist, but nothing was published. The journalist, though, telephoned the chief of staff in Tel Aviv. “I think there is something you ought to hear,” he said.

Elazar read Bailey’s five pages in his presence. He picked up the phone and asked for Sharon. “I understand the people displaced for the maneuvers haven’t gone back yet … I want them back tomorrow! How do I know? There’s a Dr. Bailey here. He’s been there. He’s written a report and submitted it to me.”

A few days later, Bailey received a telephoned invitation to meet with the CO of Southern Command at his headquarters in Beersheba. Sharon positively radiated bonhomie. “We’ve got something in common,” he said, beaming at Bailey, “because I really like the Bedouin.” He regaled the scholar with stories of Bedouin trackers whom he’d fought alongside. He loved to spend time, he said, with the colorful sheikh Awda of the Azazme tribe, eating mutton and talking in his tent. “I don’t know what happened here,” he added breezily about Bailey’s report. Anyway, the tribes were back on their land. If Dr. Bailey ever needed anything, any help with his research, he was to please feel free to ask.

No sooner had Bailey left than Sharon issued an order barring him from access to any IDF facility anywhere in Sinai. Bailey learned of it from a Bedouin officer-friend. He telephoned Elazar and reported this, too. “Soon they called me back and said, ‘You can go wherever you want in Sinai …’ Why didn’t I press Sharon [about the deaths]? I was barely 30 years old. A kid doing research. He was a big war hero.”

How was this appalling episode successfully hushed up? In part, presumably, it was because the tribes from deeper inside Sinai, unlike the Rafah Bedouin, had no neighborly relationship with the left-wing kibbutzim along the border. There was no one to encourage them to apply to the high court.

But more relevant, perhaps, was the top secret nature of the military maneuvers to which Chief of Staff Elazar referred in his phone call to Sharon and from which the Bedouin were so brutally distanced. On February 20–25, 1972, at the instance of Sharon and in the presence of Golda, Dayan, and the General Staff, the IDF exercised ferrying an entire armored division, under fire, across the Suez Canal. This remarkable war game was conducted at Abu Agheila, near the Bedouin’s encampments.⁴²

“Sharon had a great idea,” writes General Bren Adan, then the Armored Corps commander and no admirer as a rule of Sharon. “Through relatively minor engineering work, he was able to enlarge the small Ruafa’a Dam, located in the middle of the desert in northern Sinai, which absorbs the flood waters that flow through the el-Arish wadi during the winter rains. Thus a small water obstacle was created that would enable us, despite the limitations of its location and its size, to conduct a ‘wet’ crossing operation combined with a live fire exercise.”⁴³

CASTLES IN THE SAND

The exercise at Abu Agheila, code-named Oz (Power), was not an unqualified success. It underscored the huge logistical problems involved in deploying bridging craft to get a large force of armor across the canal.

After the 1967 war, Adan writes, the IDF had purchased “floatable iron cubes—uni-floats—each of which measured 5 x 2.5 x 1.2 meters and weighed three tons.” A large crane was required to unload them. Engineers then assembled them in the water in groups of nine, with hydraulically operated ramps on the front and back ends and outboard motors on the sides. These lumbering giant rafts could ferry tanks across. Assembling them took about an hour, Adan writes. Once there were several of them in operation, they could be linked together to form a bridge across the waterway.

After Oz, Adan writes, he worked with the deputy chief of staff, General Tal, to develop “a roller bridge.” This monster “consisted of more than 100 iron rollers, two meters in diameter, which were attached together to make one rolling bridge 180 meters long. The main advantage of a roller bridge was that it could be pushed into the Canal.” Among its many disadvantages, however, was that it took three days to build, it weighed four hundred tons,^m it required an entire company of sixteen tanks to drag it along, and it could only travel in a straight line.

Given these drawbacks, the IDF wisely decided to invest, too, in a batch of fairly ancient amphibious bridging tugs, called Gilowas. These, Adan explains, were “very large vehicles with correspondingly large wheels that were capable of moving to the water, floating, and—by means of hydraulic power—opening up two treadways suitable for tank tracks…[T]hree such vehicles formed a raft unit capable of traveling across the water from bank to bank while carrying one tank. Six of them joined together would … carry two tanks.” If there were enough of them, they could form a bridge. Their disadvantage was that they floated on inflatable rubber sleeves, easily perforated by enemy fire. “This problem could be overcome by filling the floats with a light foamy material.”

Above all, Oz demonstrated that the army and the government were committed, should war come, to the basic strategy of crossing the canal and carrying the battle to the Egyptian side. This was the unanimous assumption and the unanimous intention. When war did come, and bitter fights erupted between Sharon, Adan, and other generals, the issue was never whether to cross but only when and how. The misconception in some popular quarters that Sharon initiated the canal crossing was just that—a misconception (eagerly propagated by Sharon). By the same token, Oz demonstrated that the Bar-Lev Line was never envisaged as a war winner in itself, even by its most ardent advocates. There was never any illusion of the attacking Egyptians dissipating their strength against a line of Israeli fortresses. Everyone on the Israeli side agreed that to win the war, the IDF would need to counterattack on the western bank of the canal.

President Nasser had died suddenly in September 1970 and was succeeded by the uncharismatic-looking Anwar Sadat, a more junior member of the original 1952 Free Officers’ coup. Sadat announced publicly that he was prepared to make peace with Israel but got no commensurate response from Prime Minister Meir. Moshe Dayan had been promoting the idea of an interim agreement between the two countries. Israel, he suggested, would pull back from the Suez Canal to a distance of several miles, and Egypt would reopen the waterway and restore civilian life to the deserted towns on its banks. The Egyptian army would not be allowed back into Sinai, but civilian personnel, including police, would cross over in order to operate the waterway. Once the canal was pulsing with commerce again, Dayan reasoned, Egypt would have much less incentive to resume hostilities.

In early 1971, Sadat put forward his own proposals for an interim agreement that in many respects overlapped with Dayan’s. Sadat insisted, though, that the interim accord be integrally linked to a final accord, requiring complete Israeli withdrawal. Throughout 1971 indirect negotiations continued under the UN envoy Gunnar Jarring over ideas for an interim or partial settlement. The Americans, too, tried to build diplomatic momentum on the proximity of Sadat’s and Dayan’s thinking. They had to contend, though, with the sad reality that Dayan’s thinking did not reflect Golda’s and with the no less sad reality that he was not prepared to fight, politically, for his own view. The Israeli prime minister and key ministers around her—Galili, Allon, later Bar-Lev, too—were locked into the mind-set that there must be no withdrawal without full and final peace.

Sadat made an even more dramatic move in 1972, dismissing the fifteen-thousand-odd Soviet military advisers stationed in Egypt and arresting pro-Soviet figures among the Egyptian leadership. Clearly, he wanted to move Egypt back into the Western camp. Again, Israel read him wrong. The analysis in Jerusalem was that this move reduced the risk of war. In fact, Sadat felt he could not go to war so long as the overweening Russians were embedded in his army, presuming to constrain his actions and dictate his decisions. “Sadat’s purpose was completely misunderstood [by Israel],” Herzog writes, “a fact that contributed in no small measure to the strengthening of the ‘concept.’ ”⁴⁴

The “concept,” or in Hebrew conceptziya, was the term coined after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 to describe the blind arrogance that suffused the whole Israeli policy elite—the government and the army, but much of academia and the media, too—in the period leading up to the war. “We are all to blame,” the president of the state, Ephraim Katzir, observed as the country grappled with its shock and mourning after the war ended. He was accused at the time of trying to deflect the main blame from the Labor government by dissipating it among the entire nation. But in a deep sense he was right. The hubris broadcast by the government reflected the corruption of the national ethos by delusions of grandeur in the wake of the 1967 conquests. The military intelligence assessment that Egypt and Syria would not go to war was rooted in a much broader national conviction that they would not dare to do it.

Sharon pretended in later years that he was not part of the hubristic overconfidence that deadened Israel’s senses. “When Anwar Sadat announced in his 1972 Ramadan address that ‘next year I will be blessing you from Sinai,’ I for one had no doubts about his intentions. Unlike many Israelis, I had always considered the Arabs serious people … I had no doubt at all that at some point they would launch an attack.”⁴⁵

In fact, he was a pillar of the conceptziya. In July 1973 he assured the public in a newspaper interview that Israel’s security situation was “wonderful.” Israel had become “a middle-sized military power with enormous strength … As long as we stay on the present borders the Arabs have no chance of winning a war.”

Two months later—and two weeks before the Yom Kippur War—he asserted with sweeping confidence, “Israel now stands before years of quiet in terms of defense. We need to use the time to deal with other issues that concern us. We are in the best possible situation in terms of defense.”

By this time, the summer of 1973, he was speaking no longer as a soldier but as a prominent politician, the election campaign director of the Likud, a new amalgam of all the parties of the Right that in less than two months he had managed to weld together as the first-ever serious political challenge to Labor’s hegemony. The election was set for October 31. Sharon seriously believed that the Likud could win, or could at least give Labor a much closer run than it had ever faced before. To that end, he had even embarked on a rigorous diet in order to make himself more attractive on the hustings.

His metamorphosis from grizzled warrior to political charmer came as a surprise to the public but not to him. David Elazar had made it clear soon after he took office as chief of staff the year before that he wanted him to retire from the army on completion of his term as CO of Southern Command. There was not much affection between the two of them.ⁿ

But the new chief could argue that easing out Sharon was not personal: he planned a sweeping change of generation in the General Staff, with all those over forty-five making way for younger men. Sharon saw himself as by far the best-qualified candidate for chief of staff after Elazar. He appealed Elazar’s decision to Dayan and then to Golda. But to no avail: both of them refused to intervene on his behalf.

Having decided to make his future in politics, Sharon proceeded to harness the ending of his old career to the launching of his new one. At a party in the garden of his home in Beersheba on the night of his formal retirement, July 15, he embarrassed the many serving officers present with a blistering attack on the chief of staff and the “top echelon of the defense establishment.” He had to speak out, he said, because so many people had been urging him to stay on in uniform.⁴⁶ The subtext was clear: his military career had been stymied because he was not a supporter—but a critic—of the ruling Labor Party. There was a more important insinuation, too—and in a private conversation with Dayan, Sharon had spelled it out—that he did not consider his successor as CO of Southern Command, Shmuel Gonen, up to the job.⁴⁷

Such washing of the army’s dirty linen in public was unprecedented. Sharon added insult to insult by informing the chief of staff that he would not attend the traditional General Staff dinner given for every retiring general. They could send the engraved wristwatch in the mail, he wrote. He waived another “tradition”—the right to sum up his years of service at a press conference with military correspondents. He would speak with the press in his own way, he signaled, and in his own time. He did ask, though, to be invited one last time to the General Staff to take his leave of his colleagues there. Elazar agreed and Dayan attended, too, and heaped praise on the outgoing Sharon. This somewhat defused the tension and left no option for Sharon to be curmudgeonly in response. There was also a pleasant surprise for him: Dayan immediately concurred when he asked him for a reserves appointment as commander of an armored division on the southern front.

The next day, he met with the press, on his own terms. He hired a hall at the Tel Aviv press center and invited political, not military, correspondents to listen to him. But he was headline news and everyone came, including foreign correspondents. “ ‘Loyal opposition’ is not good enough,” he declared. “We need to create an alternative.” This elusive goal he, a civilian of forty-eight hours’ standing, proposed to achieve in time for the election in October. “Israel styles itself a democracy. But there is one area where our democracy is deficient: the realistic prospect of changing the government. It is totally wrong for one party to rule for decades on end, without facing any serious danger of being replaced.”

He flatly denied reports that he had conducted secret contacts with Labor with a view to becoming a minister after the election.⁴⁸ Labor, realizing that he was headed to the other side, had nastily leaked the fact that he was a card-carrying member of the party. But Sharon at his press conference turned that to his advantage, demonstratively tearing up his party card.⁴⁹

He proposed not a right-wing alliance but a centrist bloc. He would approach “Herut, the Liberals, the Free Center, the State List, and if possible the Independent Liberals too. These are the potential partners in an alignment of centrist parties that will stand against the Labor Alignment.”^50o

In the event, the intricate negotiations, which Sharon mediated with unflagging energy over the following weeks, boiled down to how to splice them all together equitably in a single list of candidates, and on September 13 the formal signing ceremony of the Likud took place at last. “You’ve shown the stubbornness of a mule,” Yigael Hurwitz, the State List leader and a veteran farming man, said, showering compliments on Sharon. “And the belligerence of a bull,” Sharon added, preferring his own farmyard metaphor.

Sharon spoke as a farmer, too. Not just as a son of Kfar Malal, where his mother, Vera, feisty as ever, was still running the family homestead, but as the proud new proprietor of a vast (by Israeli standards) ranch in the south of the country that he and Lily had named Sycamore Ranch.

They both wanted a farm, if only as an “insurance policy” given the fragility of a political career. But after twenty-five years in the military, he bridled at any thought of collective discipline, which is an inherent part of moshav farming in Israel. He would grow and raise what he wanted, how he wanted. Private farms in Israel are few and far between, but he alighted on one in the northern Negev near the little immigrant town of Sderot and immediately fell in love with it. It was a four-thousand-dunam holding,^p most of it barren, with a farmhouse in fairly run-down condition and a few sycamore trees. Sharon liked the size, but also the remoteness. It had belonged in the 1950s to his old friend Rafi Eitan, who held a long-term lease from the state. Eitan later sold his rights to an Australian Zionist sheep rancher, but now it was on the market again.

“But how to buy it? I had received from my parents the greatest spiritual wealth a child could want, but not a penny of money—they had never had a penny free. My whole adult life I had spent in the army living on the subsistence salary of a career officer. So there were no savings to draw on. And now as I made the round of Israeli banks I found that a private person simply could not get a farm loan.”⁵¹

He needed $600,000. He got it with the help of Avraham Krinitzi, the mayor of Ramat Gan, the town neighboring Tel Aviv that had “adopted” the paratroop brigade. Krinitzi had often heard his friend Meshulam Riklis, an ex-Israeli now living and flourishing in America, complaining that the IDF was forgoing bold, rightist generals like Ezer Weizman^q and Arik Sharon. Now, Krinitzi suggested, Riklis could pitch in to help Sharon. Riklis agreed without hesitation. People like Sharon, he replied to Krinitzi, should not have to worry about money. They should worry about one thing: defending Israel.

Riklis met with Sharon, who was still in uniform, and offered him a standing loan of $200,000, interest-free, to help buy the ranch—but on one condition: that he did not make do with being a rancher but stayed involved in matters of defense and foreign policy. Riklis’s views were of the Right, and he believed Sharon would champion them.

With the first $200,000 thus generously covered, Sharon was able to raise the rest of the money in the form of a loan from the Exchange National Bank of Chicago, which had recently opened a branch in Israel. Here, too, personal and political sympathies seem to have been interwoven with the lender’s financial considerations: Samuel Sax, Exchange National’s chairman, was a former U.S. Navy Reserve officer who knew Sharon and presumably supported his political ambitions. But his loan, linked to the dollar, was to be paid back at the rate of $50,000 a year, starting immediately.

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^a He received his law degree in 1966.

^b “Dear and Exalted Arik,” Ben-Gurion wrote to him, “I was glad to hear that you’ve become a general. To me, you were a general years ago. But what has changed is that certain failings which you had then, I believe, you don’t have anymore … My trust has not been disappointed” (IDF Archives).

^c Twelve planes were left behind, Rabin writes. Their job was to defend the whole country for the first few hours of the war.

^d The Wall was to have been accessible to Israelis under a provision of the 1949 Armistice Agreement, but Jordan refused to honor it.

^e See below p. 73.

^f “Specifically, I proposed that we should base our defense on the natural line of hills and dunes that runs parallel to the Canal five to eight miles to the east … A second line with our mobile reserves should be established fifteen to twenty miles from the Canal, where the mountains begin and the Mitla and Gidi passes cut toward the interior …” (Warrior, 220).

^g Acronym for the Hebrew: Bloc (of) Herut, Liberals.

^h A nasty sideswipe but not inaccurate: within ten weeks of his retirement as chief of staff in January 1972, Bar-Lev was in the Labor government as minister of trade and industry.

ⁱ After the War of Attrition ended, Tal pointed out that a very high proportion of Israel’s casualties had been sustained inside the strongpoints or in the course of supplying them. The other school countered, reasonably enough, that without the strongpoints the casualty figures might have been higher.

^j As prime minister, Sharon appointed Dagan, by then a reserves general, head of the Mossad. He held the post for eight years.

^k In the Rafah Salient, too, as in the adjacent Gaza Strip, a couple of isolated settlements had come into being by this time. The Bedouin landholders were quietly compensated.

^l The High Court of Justice in the Israeli system is the Supreme Court in its role as the court (of first instance) that hears petitions against the executive branch.

^m Sharon and his staff officers in the Yom Kippur War, who grappled with the rolling bridge and eventually laid it across the canal, claimed it weighed six hundred tons.

ⁿ With Bar-Lev, on the other hand, Sharon’s relations had markedly improved. “You are an outstanding commander,” the outgoing chief of staff told Sharon in their parting interview.

You have strategic understanding and operational ability and the capacity to push things forward. As you know, I criticized aspects of your behavior in the past that were detrimental to the army’s interests and detrimental to you, too. I am glad that in this latter period, as CO of Southern Command, these things have receded and over the past two years you have discharged your duties in a very professional way. I hope that as CO of Southern Command you have come to recognize the wisdom of the concept of holding strongpoints on the shore of the canal and that in the future, too, you will continue to deny the Egyptians any territorial gain. (Gai, Bar-Lev, 212)

^o The Free Center, with four members of the Knesset, was a breakaway from Herut, led by the lawyer Shmuel Tamir. Tamir had bridled at Menachem Begin’s autocratic rule over his party and had been forced to secede. By listing the Free Center, Sharon was signaling that he, too, would not be cowed by Begin’s authoritarian ways, which deterred middle-of-the-road voters. The State List, also with four members in the present Knesset, was the rump of Ben-Gurion’s Rafi Party. Its hard core were salt-of-the-earth moshavniks. The Independent Liberals, also a Knesset faction of four, were out-and-out doves, a far cry from the old Irgun “fighting family” who were still the backbone of Begin’s Herut. There was little chance they would join, and when it came to it, they didn’t, but Sharon lost nothing by listing them. Another component of the new Likud was the Movement for Greater Israel, a group mainly of ex-Laborites headed by Sharon’s old friend and commander, Avraham Yoffe.

^p A dunam is one thousand square meters.

^q Weizman, another avowed and outspoken right-winger, had left the army in 1969 and joined Herut, serving as a minister in the government of national unity.